Revisions Which A Minute Will Reverse
by sparrow.marrow
Summary: We say "AU", but it could maybe be canon if you disregard a line or two in JE and squint a little. The title is a line from T S Eliot's "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock", because we're trendy like that, apparently. This is much much more than a recap of Turn Left. Ten, Ten2, Rose, Donna, Jack, Tosh & many many more.


This fic was written many many moons ago, but I realized that I had never posted it here. It is a collaboration fic with _thirty2flavors from livejournal so half of the credit goes to her. It is probably my favorite thing I have ever written. This is our version of Turn Left and also our head canon. _  
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* * *

_Donna pushes through the crowds of Shan Shen, hands shoved in her pockets. There is so much to see. One table is loaded down with rows and rows of delicate silver and bronze bells and another stall is stacked with crates of sticky sweet fruits. There are stacks of vibrant fabrics, piles of jewellery, cans, candles, and jars full of incense all shaded by huge silk awnings striped in every different hue. The air is spicy and thick, full of smoke and drifting colours. She leaves the Doctor behind her, letting him gesture enthusiastically at a vender in a red velvet cap._

"Tell your fortune, lady?" A woman in a black shawl embroidered with fat golden flowers calls out to her and Donna turns. "Your future predicted, your life foretold."

She shakes her head, amused. "Ah, no thanks."

The fortuneteller inclines her head, smiling, "Don't you want to know if you're going to be happy?"

There was a time, Donna thinks, when that line might have worked. "I'm happy right now, thanks."

"You've got red hair. Reading's free for red hair." The woman turns and gestures towards her tent, pulling back a sheer curtain of scarlet fabric.

Donna hesitates, and then laughs. "All right, then."

* * *

The Doctor shoves open his hotel room window and leans his head out as best he can, appreciating the cool, crisp Norway air. The hotel room is by no stretch of the imagination the worst he's ever been in, but by no means is it the nicest, either; the walls seem cramped and close, the two beds taking up an unnecessary amount of space. The drapes seem to be made from the skins of sofas from the seventies, and he can't help but wonder what could possibly have been going on in the mind of whoever chose the carpet.

Must be a Donna thought, he thinks. He can't recall caring about hotel room carpets before.

He takes a deep breath and stares down at the empty expanse of car park below. He's probably not being fair to the hotel, it must be said. If it were five-star and ludicrously large, the Doctor suspects he would feel just as claustrophobic.

He can't hear the TARDIS anymore.

Best not to dwell on it, he supposes; he should probably also avoid looking at the little sign attached to the telly that reads 'Now Offering Over 25 Channels!' in Norwegian. It seems he'll being doing all of his own translating these days. Best not to dwell or he'll go mad long before Rose ever manages to meet his eyes again, let alone "make him better".

Probably best not to dwell on that, either.

Instead he tilts his head up, squinting up at the dark Norway sky and the stars they'd just helped save. The moon is there, small and silver, the tip of a nail head holding the sky in place. It's strange, he thinks, the possibility of different stars and different constellations, entire galaxies he's never properly visited.

He's known the names of all the stars visible from Earth for virtually as long as he can remember, in Gallifreyan and all of Earth's languages. He knows the names of the constellations, too, had memorised them long ago as tokens of humanity's ingenuity and creativity. Struggling to cope with something they didn't understand, humans told stories - of mighty gods and reclining queens, snarling animals and powerful weapons. Myths etched into the sky, a cosmic game of connect-the-dots using only pinpricks of distant light and imagination. On Gallifrey, stars had been named for utility, not creativity.

It's June, so he should be seeing Bootes the ancient huntsmen and Ursa Minor, the drinking cup bejewelled with the North Star. Lupus should be there as well, rising in the east, ominous and hungry. But here, now, those names may be wrong. The stories might be different. Stars may have burnt out or flickered into existence at different times in this Earth's history. He might even have to buy a book to learn their proper names. The thought in itself is horrifying.

He leans farther out the window, craning his neck to get a better look at the night. The sky is sparse tonight. He counts six stars where there ought to be dozens. Light pollution, he supposes, and then frowns. That can't be right. The little hotel is far from any major source of light and some of the brightest stars - Dubhe, Izar, and Segnius, to name a few - are missing.

A knock on the hotel door sends him flinching uncharacteristically and he hits his head on the windowsill.

"Doctor?"

The sound of Rose's voice sends a strange shiver down his spine, one he can't seem to classify as wholly good or bad. She's been quiet most of the day, reeling no doubt from exhaustion and confusion. It bothers him, how sad she still looks, like she's been robbed of first place and made to settle for silver. It's his fault, probably. He's been selfish. He wonders if he's done the wrong thing.

You think? snaps a voice in his head that sounds remarkably like Donna Noble. Did it never occur to you that people might like to make their own decisions for once?

"It's open," he calls, rubbing his sore head with one hand.

The door creaks as it opens and Rose sticks her head in, cautious and awkward. She's pinned her fringe back, for what purpose he can't tell, and the hesitant smile on her face does little to make her look happier. "Mum ordered food to our room, did you want some?"

"Sure." He pulls back from the window and pauses, beckoning her forward. "Come look at this."

She shuffles across the room, heavy utilitarian boots making muffled thumps against the fungus coloured carpet, and stands next to him. He nods out the window and watches her face as she studies the sky. "Are there always so few stars out here?"

Rose squeezes closer to him to look out the open window. "Never used to be." She shrugs. "We lost a lot of them."

The Doctor frowns and gives his ear a tug. "Well, yeah, except they should be back. The Reality Bomb never happened so it should be like they were never gone."

She frowns out the window, shaking her head in disbelief. "But we stopped it," she says. "Donna stopped it." She looks at him, seeking confirmation, her voice increasingly frantic. "We were there, we saw her, she stopped it!"

The Doctor says nothing, staring instead at the inky blackness where there ought to be spots of light. He hears Rose sigh, shaky, before she pulls herself together and straightens up.

"Right." She stands straighter, meets his eyes and squares her shoulders, channelling the determined energy he's missed so much. "So something's wrong. What do we do?"

His hand runs through his hair as he paces back and forth across the small room. "This cannon of yours, is that in London?"

She nods, curt and quick. "Yeah, it's at Torchwood."

"Right. Think I'd better take a look. You still got that dimension hopper?"

"Yeah." She pulls the device from her pocket and stares at it. "But it's only good for one person, and even with Mum's we've only got two of them."

The Doctor grins. He pulls the screwdriver from his pocket and waves it back and forth. "Oh, nothing a little jiggery-pokery can't fix."

If she notices the allusion, she ignores it. Instead she looks at the screwdriver in surprise, her brow furrowing suspiciously. "Did you steal that?"

"Oi! How could I steal my own screwdriver?" She doesn't answer and the Doctor waves a hand. "Anyway, no, it's a spare. Two suits, two screwdrivers. Much more convenient. Wouldn't want to go forgetting it. Broke it, once, when I first met Martha, huge inconvenience there, and by then I was already wearing the blue suit — do you like the blue? — and so when I made a new one I thought, might as well make two, that way–"

"Doctor." Her eyes are wide and he chooses to believe she's just very successful at suppressing her smile. "The stars?"

He snaps his mouth shut and nods. "Stars, yes. Come on, we'd better get your mother, can't go leaving her in a hotel in Norway, we'd never hear the end of it." He bounds to the doorway and pauses, turning to find her frozen by the window pale face tilted up towards the sky. Her hand clenches the windowsill, knuckles white with tension and strain.

"Rose?"

She gives herself a shake. "I'm fine." She moves to the door and slips past him into the hall. "Once more unto the breach!"

Her smile is a familiar mixture of resignation and determination, and the Doctor can't help but notice that she doesn't take his hand.

* * *

Toshiko Sato drums her fingers on her desk and chews on one thumbnail. It's a habit she only lets herself indulge in while in the deepest throes of concentration, but as she's spent much of her time these past few months concentrating, her nails have been whittled to virtually nothing. She pulls the thumb from her mouth and frowns at it.

Something's gone wrong. Hours ago, word had filtered through the grapevine that Rose Tyler was back, in Norway of all places, with the day sufficiently saved. Champagne corks had been popped and most of Tosh's coworkers had left the building, intent on celebrating the end of the end of the multiverse. Tosh had only been heading to lock up her lab before joining them when she'd noticed something very strange.

The Dimension Cannon was still on.

"It's fine," Adeola had insisted, tugging at her arm. "Forget about it. Maybe it'll keep working. You can't expect to know everything about this stuff." When Tosh had refused to budge, Adeola shook her head and left on her own. "Honestly, you're almost as obsessed with this thing as Tyler."

The problem was — is — that Tosh herself designed the Dimension Cannon, with some helpful assistance from one Malcolm Taylor. She knows the machine inside and out, and she knows that there are many things about this that don't make sense.

Firstly, it shouldn't still be working; from what she and Malcolm could best make out, it was whatever was taking out the stars — the Darkness, as Torchwood had nicknamed it — that allowed the cannon to run. The how or why had been unclear, but Rose had reasoned several times that the Darkness must be weakening the walls that separated one universe from another. Their hypothesis had been that when the job was done — when the Darkness was stopped and Rose was back where she wanted to be — the Cannon would stop working, simply shut itself off in the same bizarre way it had turned itself on.

Now, the Darkness has been defeated and the Cannon still works. Tosh supposes it's possible that they've guessed wrong, except…

Well, she and Malcolm are quite clever — not that she likes to brag.

It figures, she supposes, that he would choose this time to stop answering his mobile. Probably he's off celebrating. She sighs and narrows her eyes across the room at the Cannon, willing it to take pity on her as its creator and impart some helpful wisdom.

It doesn't. Frustrated, Tosh chews the nail on her pinky finger.

The other issue, of course, is that Rose Tyler is back in the first place. In its initial conception, the Cannon was to be a one-way street, a way to launch Rose back to the universe she came from without destroying the fabric of reality or anything equally dramatic. That Rose would find her intended universe and then come back… well, it didn't quite add up.

Tosh has just moved on to her ring finger's nail when a bright flash behind her sends her leaping to her feet in alarm. Spinning, Tosh finds herself face-to-face with Rose and Jackie Tyler and a man in a blue suit.

Tosh stares.

"Hi," Rose says, and Tosh thinks she sounds about as tired as she did when she left.

The man surveys the room and the corner of his mouth tilts up in a smile.

"Told you it would work. How's that for accuracy? Oh, I am good." He pulls what seems to be an oversized penlight and shines it at the hopper in his hand. There's whirring sort of noise and then he tosses the hopper to Jackie. "There you go, that'll take you home. Sleep tight."

Jackie catches it and scowls. "If this lands me in the wrong spot, I'm gonna kill you." Her expression softens as it falls on Rose. "You be careful, sweetheart."

Rose's lips twitch, though she doesn't smile. "Yeah. Go home, Mum."

Jackie Tyler disappears in another flash of light.

With barely a cursory glance at Tosh, the man bounds across the room to the Cannon. He peers curiously at it, leaning in and squinting, his free hand groping around in his pocket and seeming to come up short. He twists and turns to inspect the machine from every imaginable angle, making occasional appreciative or disparaging noises, and Toshiko finally finds her voice.

"I'm sorry, who are you?"

He spares a quick glance over the shoulder and wiggles his fingers in greeting. "I'm the Doctor. Hello!" And then he directs his attention back to the Cannon.

Tosh is distantly aware of how rude she's being when her eyes go wide.

He can't possibly mean he's the Doctor.

Tosh had done her very best to focus on building the Cannon itself, rather than go hunting for the details of the back-story. Still, it is impossible to work for Pete Tyler's Torchwood and not know things about his daughter-who-isn't, or the omnipotent, time-travelling alien she's determined to get back to. What Tosh knows about the Doctor is little more than that — a powerful, genius alien with a spaceship that could travel through time.

It was hard not to romanticise such a story — lovers locked away in different worlds, fighting to find each other again. It sounded like a fairy-tale. Facing them now, the Doctor a scrawny bloke in a slightly deplorable blue suit and Rose looking anything but overjoyed, Tosh finds the simile to be lacking.

She glances at Rose only to find she's moved to look out the window.

"We think something's gone wrong," Rose explains, meeting Tosh's curious gaze. "The stars aren't back yet, but they ought to be."

"I knew it!" Tosh exclaims, and then instantly feels silly when her enthused outburst earns her startled looks from both the Doctor and Rose. "It's just — I mean, they said you were back and that you'd done it, but when I came in here to lock up the Cannon was still running and I thought, that shouldn't be right, if you'd really fixed everything it'd have turned itself off." She finds the Doctor staring at her and shifts uncomfortably. "I mean, I think, anyway. It was all just theory we were working with, so–"

"You're right," he says. "Dimensional retroclosure ought to have rendered this a pretty but ultimately useless hunk of metal." He looks back at the Cannon and pats the side of it. "It's a clever machine, but it's not powerful enough to rip through the walls of the universe. Not without help, anyway."

Tosh shrugs. "Well, we didn't want to collapse the universe."

The Doctor raises one eyebrow. "How considerate of you." He rotates on his heel to look at Rose. "Rose, how many worlds did you go through to find the right one?"

"Dozens," Rose says. She sounds tired — a far cry, Tosh thinks, from the woman who'd taken a very large gun and set off to save the world. Rose drags her gaze away from the window and the empty night sky to look at him. "It was awful. Most of them…" She shrugs and folds her arms across her chest. "Most of them were terrible, especially the ones without organizations like Torchwood. All sorts of things happened because there was no one to stop them from happening, worlds in panic because the stars were going out and they didn't know why." She lowers her eyes and addresses the floor. "I couldn't help any of them. I didn't have time, I had to find you, we had to stop whatever was causing the Darkness and I couldn't —"

"You helped Donna," the Doctor states. He stands metres away from Rose, his hands in his pockets and his face blank, but Tosh feels as though she's stumbled in on something personal. She's seen her fair share of office relationships and she's seen the way they seem to both begin and end with awkward formality and restraint.

Rose shakes her head, closing her eyes and rubbing her thumbs over her eyelids. "What?"

"That parallel world," he goes on, "with Donna. You helped her; you sent her back to me." At Rose's blank stare, the Doctor frowns. "You know, Bad Wolf? Stars are going out?"

Rose drops her hand from her eyes and stares at him. "I don't know what you mean."

The Doctor's brow bends in confusion. "How can you not...?" He narrows his eyes and Tosh gets the impression he's inspecting something that would be invisible to anyone else. "Unless…" Then, in a split second, his eyes go round as billiard balls and he leaps backward, pointing one hand at Rose enthusiastically. "Oh, yes! That's it! Classic time loop, oh, that's brilliant!" He grabs his hair with both hands and Tosh takes solace in the fact that Rose looks just as bewildered as she is.

"Classic what?" asks Rose. She shoves herself away from the windowsill and takes a step towards him with narrowed eyes.

"You mean like in films?" Tosh folds her arms across her chest and frowns in thought. "She doesn't remember because it hasn't happened for her yet, but you do, because for you it has?"

"Exactly!" His enthusiasm falters for a second and he frowns. "Oh, I hope that's not becoming a trend."

"You'd think it would happen a lot," Tosh reasons. "I mean, with time travel and everything."

He grins at her and Tosh can't help but think he looks a little mad. "Yeah, bit of an occupational hazard."

"If that's the case," says Tosh, and she can feel the pieces clicking together, "then we just need to–"

"Close the loop," the Doctor finishes. "Shouldn't be too bad, really, just got to–"

Rose sucks in a breath through her teeth, and the Doctor snaps his mouth shut. "If it's something I've got to do, you gonna tell me what it is?"

Abashed, the Doctor sends one last awkward look in Tosh's direction before he turns to Rose. "Right. Yes. Sorry." He runs a hand through his hair, leaving it in more disarray than before; Tosh is suddenly reminded of a rooster. "Just before the Earth was stolen I took Donna to a market on Shan Shen. She wandered off, of course, everyone always wanders off, and wound up in trouble with a member of the Trickster's Brigade — sort of… changes an event in someone's timeline. It's a minor thing, usually, but with Donna it created a brand new parallel world, one where she'd never met me."

"But she met me," Rose says.

"Oh, yes." He nods and then waffles, waving one hand back and forth. "Not that she knew it was you. Of course, not that she'd have known it was you even if she knew it was you, because she didn't know you because she didn't know me."

"Right." The ready way Rose nods along gives Tosh the impression that the Doctor's explanations are frequently this… elaborate. "And what did I do when she met me though she didn't know that she met me?"

"No idea!" He smiles regretfully at the admission but shrugs his shoulders. "Donna couldn't remember. But I know what you must have done. Somehow you reversed it; you went back to where the timeline went wrong and you set it right."

"Can't you send me there right away? Stop it before it happens?"

The smile drops from the Doctor's face as he shakes his head. "No — first because we don't know when that is, and second because Donna has to remember you. She remembers you and tells me and we head back to Earth."

Tosh watches as Rose nods along, and finds herself reminded again of why Rose had slipped to the upper echelons of Torchwood for reasons that had nothing to do with her last name. She's clever and quick and ready for anything, adaptable and determined. She looks the way she had when she'd left Torchwood only hours ago for what everyone presumed to be the last time — battle-ready and world-weary.

The look on the Doctor's face is similar.

"So I've got to… get there," Rose says, slowly, reasoning it out, "meet Donna, and then travel back in time. Somehow. You don't know how I do it, but you know that I do."

He gives her a ghost of a grin. "Now you've got it."

"Your ship?" Tosh suggests, and hopes she doesn't sound too eager. The possibility of getting a glimpse of the time machine Rose had lovingly described makes Tosh just the slightest bit giddy.

But the Doctor and Rose stare at her like she's brought up a lost loved one, and the Doctor shakes his head. "No ship," he says softly. Then, evidently aware of the drop in his enthusiasm, he breaks into a grin and bounds to close the gap between himself and the Cannon, patting the machine affectionately. "We'll use this." He pulls the penlight back out of his pocket and looks over at Rose. "You ready?"

Rose responds with the sort of grin that matches the phrase "grin and bear it". "As I'll ever be."

Tosh takes a step forward, watching as the Doctor shines the penlight on the Cannon's control panel. "Sorry, it's just — it took us weeks to find the right universe and to get Rose there on time." She leaves unspoken the implication that they can't possibly have enough time.

The Doctor shrugs her off. "That was different."

Tosh furrows her brow, feeling very much as though she's missing something important. "How?"

He pauses, looks up, and then his mouth cracks into a grin. "This time you've got me."

And then, much to Tosh's horror, he rips open the Cannon's control panel.

* * *

_Donna dashes out into the street along with everyone else, elbowing her way through the crowd. The December air is cold and damp, a marked change from the heat of the bar. People are shouting, staring up at the night sky._

"What the hell is that?" her mate Mooky shouts, pointing up at a large star that is gliding over the rooftops, humming and crackling with bright white electricity.

"Ken Livingston, that's what - spending our money on decorations…" Veena mutters, and then add, louder, "I mean, how much did that cost?"

Mooky looks over at her incredulously. "Don't be so stupid, Veena, it's flying! It's really flying!"

As the star drifts across the sky, the crowd follows.

"That's not a star," Donna says, suddenly certain. "That's a web. It's heading east... the middle of the city." Donna's stomach is turning nervously, an ominous feeling pressing up against her throat. There's a funny feeling in the back of her head, like déjà vu.

Her back twitches, and Donna shakes herself. Suddenly, the web erupts, shooting lightning bursts of electricity into the city. In the distance, Donna can hear screams and explosions as smoke rises up over the city and the crowd panics. All around her the street empties, but Donna is frozen in place, adrenaline surging through her body. She becomes aware of Alice hovering behind her.

"Alice. There's a great big web-star thing shooting at people, and you're looking at me?"

Alice's voice is thin and frightened. "There's something on your back." The white of her eyes glisten in the dark as she whispers again, "There's something on your back!"

Alice bolts, but Donna ignores her, taking a few hesitant steps towards the direction of the star, her heart slamming frantically into her ribcage. She starts to run, pulled forward by curiosity and something else as well, some strange sort of magnetism Donna can't explain.

Behind her, Veena shouts frantically. "Donna! Where are you going? You're going to get yourself killed! Donna!"

Donna runs.

* * *

Rose smells the river before she sees it. A great muddy trench is sitting where the Thames should be. The bottom, illuminated dimly by light from the city, is lined with thick drifts of silt and bits of debris: broken pieces of ships, old tires stuck fast in thick sludge, and great chunks of concrete. It stinks. A corner of her mouth turns up in wry amusement. Leave it to the Doctor to drain the Thames on Christmas Day.

It is cold. She shivers, swallowing the taste of nausea that always wells up in the back of her throat whenever she makes a jump. The first time she had shifted, she had been sick all over the street. Rose gives a cursory look around. Far off she can hear the plaintive wail of an ambulance siren even though the area where she is standing is deserted. In the distance, she can see a small gathering of army jeeps and soldiers in bright red berets. Rose shivers again. UNIT. Something is definitely going on; she just doesn't have the slightest idea what she is supposed to do about it.

The Doctor hadn't given her much to go on, just told her that somehow Donna's timeline had been pushed off course, creating an entirely different universe. He had also mumbled something about giant spiders, draining the Thames, and travelling back in time. He had it made it all seem relatively simple, but that didn't mean that whatever she was supposed to accomplish was going to be easy. Now, it seems, this is her mess to fix.

Fantastic.

She is tired, so tired, and everything has happened so quickly. Last night she was on a beach in Norway, sharing a hotel room with her mum. The night before that, she was a prisoner in a Dalek dungeon. Tonight she is standing on yet another parallel world, fighting to keep the stars from going out - again. The Doctor, Jack, dark skies, dimension cannons, Sarah Jane, her mum, Mickey, Daleks, guns, force fields, Armageddon, and windy beaches —

It is almost too much. She can feel herself bending under the weight, but she cannot break. She has to find Donna Noble, a woman she hardly knows, and tell her that the Doctor needs her. But how?

Rose sighs and looks up at the sky that, in this universe anyway, is still full of stars. Well, at least they have some time then.

Something beeps in her pocket, startling her, and she pulls out a small smooth metal cylinder from her jacket, slightly confused. She shakes it and it rattles slightly, the outside casing heats up and beings to glow pale gold. It is her TARDIS detector, one of the first things she had asked Tosh and Malcolm to design for her. It is meant to alert her to the presence of the TARDIS if it is within a six-kilometre distance. It has never worked before. To be fair, she had never really needed it before.

The device is flashing red, now, and that means the Doctor, the real Doctor, is nearby. A familiar surge of adrenaline rushes through her, followed by something bittersweet. Maybe she can find him, explain what has happened, and - but that will create a paradox, won't it? Then again, aren't they already in a paradox or a time loop or whatever it was the Doctor, the other one, had called it? What would happen if she found him now, after she had already seen him, after he had already left her again? Surely once they were safe in the TARDIS he could fix everything. She could explain…

Abruptly, she is hit by a sharp pang of something that feels suspiciously like guilt. If she finds the Doctor now, will the other Doctor cease to exist? Is that like killing, or more like merging two halves back into one whole? She runs her fingertips across her lips, remembering how it had felt to kiss him, his arms wrapped around her, the taste of salt and longing burning her mouth. When he had whispered in her ear, when he had said those words...

But it — this — isn't what she wants. It isn't what she had planned, what she had worked towards for so many years. The other Doctor isn't the real Doctor; he's not her Doctor, although, she admits, he certainly has the gob. This new Doctor, well, he moves like the proper Doctor, seems to think like the Doctor, his lips and hair and the smattering of freckles across his face are all the same. He even smells the same, like rain and electricity.

He's not the same man, though. Couldn't be. He's just some sort of advanced copy. A fluke. He'd grown out of hand, for God's sake.

Unbidden, the image of her first Doctor pops into her mind - a heavy leather jacket that always smelled faintly of smoke, shining blue eyes set deep into the folds of his face, a manic infectious grin, calloused hands that were rough to the touch, but strangely gentle. He had told her once that he would forgive her anything, if she only asked. Would he forgive her this?

The TARDIS detector continues to flash in her hand. She looks at it for a moment longer, shoves it back in her pocket, and starts to run.


End file.
